Educated ?

I did my schooling in a school, which wasn’t a good one among the locals. Not because of its staff or the infrastructure or the culture inculcated in the school. The reason was it wasn’t good enough. The students did not get enough marks to get into a respectable engineering college or a medical institute.

The fact was half of my schools students barely wore slippers and could hardly afford a fee of 1000 Rs per year. In my opinion, my school was a really the best institution. It didn’t take in students who were from rich families with a very high so called “IQ” and prove to the outside world that it had generated the top 3 ranks in TNPCEE within the zone. But it did provide the first time graduates for many families and in my opinion, that is true education.

By the way, what was TNPCEE? Was it brain crackling exam? No a horse shit.
A Tamil Nadu student’s IQ was determined by his parents in his 12th standard by this test. If he scored well and got into a good college, he is a brainy guy among the lots and his ‘career – path’ changes (in the eyes of his parents). It was a rat race and did a memory based test of trash which they called it as Science and Mathematics.

I really doubted if students really understood what E=MC² meant, even though it was an important 5 mark question in the Physics paper. Personally I knew nothing about mechanics, optics, quantum concepts, electronics or relativity. I got through the paper with ease.

I chose Computer Science engineering primarily because I knew how to set wallpaper in Windows 98 in my 11th standard. Believe me... that was one of the dreaded practical exam questions one can encounter. This level of training was to groom students who were supposed to be future programmers of fortune 500 companies. I concentrated on subjects in which I can score marks more easily and get a good percentage. I did not indulge myself in tough subjects like ‘C programming’, networking or software engineering principles.